“You dare call me Murderer?” she spat out.
He drew back, the fear on his face as great as what I’d just seen on hers. I stiffened, suddenly finding it hard to breathe.
She continued spewing words at him. “Don’t think they’re taking me off to prison, while you go back to your comfortable life at the palace. When they interrogate me, I’ll be telling them all about the money you paid me to procure you liquid nayera. I would never have poisoned my husband if you hadn’t shown me how easy it could be.”
Azzam looked ill, his eyes flying around the room. But when they latched on to me, his queasy expression grew. The whole room spun around me.
Rek’s arm caught and held me, preventing my knees from giving way.
“Zaria?” He leaned over me in concern. “What is it? Are you all right?”
“My father.” I struggled to get out the words, my eyes finding Azzam. “It was my father you poisoned, wasn’t it? His death was so sudden! I thought you were his friend, but you were always his rival.”
“No, no,” Azzam protested, but his voice sounded weak and unconvincing.
“Zahir was about to be promoted to senior vizier.” Rek sounded horrified. “But after he died, Azzam was moved up instead.”
“That’s why he moved you out of the palace so quickly!” Adara cried. “And why he lied to us about it. He didn’t want you around—or talking to us—when you were the one person most likely to ask questions about your father’s death.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Yasmine said, “but he certainly killed Zahir.” She eyed me up and down. “So you’re his daughter, then? Back before he cut contact between us, Azzam did like to go on about how the royals only favored Zahir because of your friendship with the princess.”
“That’s not true.” Rek gave Azzam a murderous stare. “Zahir was one of my father’s most promising viziers. His advice was always balanced and helpful. His position had nothing to do with Zaria.”
“He murdered him,” I said faintly. “I can’t believe my father was murdered.”
Rek’s arm cradled me even closer. “I’m so sorry, Zaria.”
With difficulty, I pulled myself together, willing strength back into my legs. I would process the news later. For now, nothing had actually changed. My father was dead, as he had been for years, and the truth about his passing didn’t bring him back.
And for all my blinding anger toward Azzam, there was a strange comfort in finally understanding the incomprehensible events that had seen me lose not only my father but my home.
At a signal from Rek, Benjamin seized Azzam by the arm and hauled him toward the small room being used as a temporary prison. The vizier tried to protest, but his thin wails left everyone unmoved.
Before Benjamin could return for Yasmine, however, the sound of wagon wheels made us all turn toward the windows. A solid, wooden wagon rolled into the courtyard, disgorging a stream of royal guards.
They marched inside, a flurry of chaotic voices and movement overwhelming the room. But within minutes, peace had returned as Esai, Isav, Jerome, Azzam, and Yasmine were loaded into the wagon and escorted onto the street, the wagon accompanied by a circle of guards on foot.
I stared out the window even after the wagon had disappeared, still seeing Yasmine’s straight back and the way she turned her face away from her father and brother. Even now, she wanted to distance herself from them, and yet everything she’d done had been because of them. She’d left them behind physically, but she’d never truly left behind their teaching or their values.
She had been given the chance to move on, but she’d rejected it—just as I had. The thought hit me hard.
Was I really any different from Yasmine? Was my refusal to let go of my father going to send me down a dark path as her own past had done to her?
But as soon as I remembered my father, I realized the nonsense of such thoughts. I had allowed the darkness of his death to poison everything else, until I thought my past was something that needed to be left behind. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it, and I’d thought that a weakness.
But faced now with what it truly meant to walk a dark path, my error seemed obvious. Yasmine should have rejected her family and her past because they brought death and pain. They had never truly loved her.
I couldn’t reject mine because it was the opposite. With my father and my friends, I had known true love. And I had seen what it meant to spend your life in service. To love others more than you loved yourself. Of course I couldn’t let that go and walk away.
My loyalty to Karema and the palace that did so much to serve its people wasn’t a weakness. It was part of who I was—a part my father had shaped with his own years of service.
I had thought it childish to cling to my past, but my naïveté had been thinking you needed to move on from losing the people you loved and who had loved you. Those people formed you as a person—you didn’t grow past them, you built up from the foundations they’d given you.
I didn’t need to leave Karema to grow into my full potential. I could do that by honoring my father’s legacy and becoming the kind of person he had showed me how to be—the kind of person who gave their life in loving service to others.
My eyes went to Rek, standing in the doorway in conversation with Samuel and Benjamin, who had remained to guard him and Adara. It wasn’t only my love of my father that had tied me to Karema. But even if I could never marry Rek, loving him had changed me. I wasn’t denying it or hiding it any longer. This was my home, and I would fight for my place in it.
Ali cleared his throat, attracting the attention of all of us who were standing idly in the dining room, unsure what to do next.